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Mr. Kelly’s silence did not save him from the president’s wrath.
“This man was totally exhausted,” Trump said of Kelly at a news conference Friday. “It couldn’t even work in the last few months.”
In the wake of The Atlantic report, the pressure on Kelly has been mounting.
“There is nothing noble about choosing loyalty to a former boss over fidelity to your oath to support and defend a Constitution that is under siege by that same boss,” said Philippe Reines, a former senior adviser to Hillary Clinton.
Mr. Reines worked for Mrs. Clinton when she was Secretary of State and praised Mr. Kelly, then the Chief Military Assistant to Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta, for quickly finding a plane to transport the bodies of the four Americans who they were killed in attacks in Benghazi, Libya, from a ceremony at Andrews Joint Base to Dover Air Force Base.
Mr. Kelly also served on the advisory board of Reines’ former consulting firm, Beacon Global Strategies. “If their silence and that of others is based on assuming that Trump will lose without them having to speak, well, we’ve seen that movie before,” Reines said. “If Trump is re-elected, his current silence will have played an important role.”
Friends and associates of Mr. Kelly said his calculation of whether or not to speak up was also intertwined with the public review of his son’s death.
“He was very secretive about the loss of his son, and we, as his staff, fully respect him,” said Elizabeth Neumann, who was Mr. Kelly’s deputy chief of staff when he was secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. “This is not the kind of thing you want to politicize and you don’t feel like it’s the right thing to talk about.”
Kelly, who served three tours in Iraq during some of the worst episodes of violence there, later became the chief military assistant, a highly influential position, to Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates; continued in the position of Mr. Panetta. Kelly became the commander of the United States Southern Command, which oversees all American military operations in Central and South America.
